#understanding

It isn't until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are - not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within - that you can begin to take control. ↗

— Oprah Winfrey

#come #control #deep #deep down #down

... understanding, and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is the one weapon against the world's bombardment, the one medicine, the one instrument by which liberty, health, and joy may be shaped or shaped towards, in the individual, and in the race. ↗

— James Agee

#age

Possibly because I've lived so much of my life in difficult circumstances, I think I have a more profound understanding of life. ↗

— Mo Yan

#circumstances #difficult #difficult circumstances #i #i think

Begin. . . where you are, NOT where you want to be. Begin stuck in the doldrums of your false story--if that is where you are. Begin there because, in truth, there is no other place to start from. Tell yourself that you are going to listen for the sound of your own voice--and remind yourself when you forget. And you will forget, over and over again. ↗

— Florence Falk

#art #clarity #lifestyle #living #loneliness

The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the developement of humility, objectivity and reason. I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person's reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears. ↗

— Erich Fromm

#conflict #empathy #erich-fromm #humility #love

the underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us... ↗

— Barack Obama

#cruelty #homosexuality #politics #religion #respect

There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome." "And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody." "And yours," he replied with a smile, "is wilfully to misunderstand them. ↗

— Jane Austen

#defects #dislike #education #hatred #misunderstanding

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love. ↗

— Meister Eckhart

#god #knowledge #love #medieval #mysticism

Just as some people may conceal their own sinfulness thus seeming better than the norm, others expose their own sinfulness thus seeming worse than the norm. ↗

— Criss Jami

#conceal #equality #evil #expose #good

Human beings have always been an unfinished species, a story in the middle, a succession of families, tribes, and societies in transition to new awarenesses. Although we have always prided ourselves on our willingness to adapt to all habitats, and on our skill at prospering and making ourselves comfortable wherever we are -- in a meadow, in a desert, on the tundra, or out on the ocean -- we don't just adapt to places, or modify them in order to ease our burdens. We're the only species that over and over again has deliberately transformed our surroundings in order to stretch our capacity for understanding and provoke new accomplishments. And our growing and enhanced understanding is our most valuable, and our most vulnerable, inheritance. ↗

— Tony Hiss

#evolution #expansion #growth #humanity #intergenerational